Websites : Personal Website, Mount Holyoke College
Joseph Ellis, a professor of history at Mount Holyoke since 1972, is one of the nation's foremost scholars of American history. Ellis's commentaries have been featured on CSPAN, CNN, and PBS's Lehrer News Hour. He has appeared in several documentaries on early America and his essays and book reviews appear regularly in national publications, such as The New York Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
He is the author of American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997); His Excellency: George Washington (2004); Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic (2008); First Family: Abigail and John Adams (2010); and Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence (2013), among others. He has contributed to The New York Times, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Ellis has won the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation; the National Book Award for American Sphinx, a biography of Thomas Jefferson; and His Excellency: George Washington was a New York Times bestseller.
For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all,...
Ellis explains of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. These men, with the help of Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, shaped...
“Accessible and electric.... [Ellis] crisply covers the decisive and improbable events of 1776.... [A] dramatic slice of history.” —USA Today
The summer months of 1776 witnessed the most consequential events in the story of our country’s founding. While the thirteen colonies came together and agreed to secede from the British...
In this rich and engrossing account, John and Abigail Adams come to life against the backdrop of the Republic’s tenuous early years.
Drawing on over 1,200 letters exchanged between the couple, Ellis tells a story both personal and panoramic. We learn about the many years Abigail and John spent apart as John’s political career sent him first to Philadelphia, then to Paris and Amsterdam; their relationship with their children; and Abigail’s role as John’s closest and most valued advisor....
National Bestseller
Acclaimed historian Joseph J. Ellis brings his unparalleled talents to this riveting account of the early years of the Republic.
The last quarter of the eighteenth century remains the most politically creative era in American history, when a dedicated group of men undertook a bold experiment in political ideals. It was a time of both triumphs and tragedies—all of which contributed to the shaping of our burgeoning nation. Ellis casts an incisive eye on the...
National Bestseller
To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions.
Here...
“A splendid book—humane, learned, written with flair and radiant with a calm intelligence and wit.” —The New York Times Book Review
The United States was more a fragile...
